Invasive Asian bighead and silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys nobilis and H. molitrix) pose a substantial threat to North American aquatic ecosystems. Recently, environmental DNA (eDNA), genetic material shed by organisms into their environment that can be detected by non-invasive sampling strategies and genetic assays, has gained recognition as a tool for tracking the invasion front of these spec...

Sublethal adverse effects may result from exposure of aquatic organisms to insecticides at environmentally relevant concentrations. Fingerlings of the common carp (Cyprinus carpio, Linnaeus, 1758), grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella, Valenciennes, 1844), and bighead carp (Aristichthys nobilis, Richardson, 1845) were exposed to diafuran, an insecticide widely used during rice cultivation in Sou...

The round goby (Neogobius melanostomus Pallas 1811) is a non-native species in the Gulf of Gdańsk. The aim of this article is to assess the absolute fecundity and attempt to describe the gonad development cycle of round goby specimens from the Gulf of Gdańsk. The stages of gonad development were classified according to the modified Nikolski (1963) scale for perciformes, which was adapted for th...

A growing concern over endocrine disruption in aquatic species has prompted the development of molecular assays to monitor environmental impacts. This study describes the development of quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) assays to characterize the expression of two vitellogenin (Vtg) genes in the invasive round goby (Neogobius melanostomus). Fragments from the 18SrRNA (housekeeping g...

Changes in animal movement (frequency or speed of locomotion) following exposure to a toxicant are frequently considered a biomarker of contaminant exposure and are some of the most widely reported behavioral results in toxicological literature. However, the ecological consequences of such behavioral changes, such as effects on toxicant transfer in foodwebs, are far less well understood, compli...

Although prey must move to forage, escape predation or gain information about predation risk, movement itself enhances the risk of predation by increasing visibility of prey and encounter rates with predators. Animals subjected to stressors often show altered behaviour; a widely cited effect of contaminant exposure is an increase in vulnerability to predation, which may be mediated by an increa...

Rainbow trout and round goby were exposed for 30 days to waterborne and dietary Ni in combination at two waterborne concentration ranges (6.2-12 μmol/L, 68-86 μmol/L), the lower of which is typical of contaminated environments. The prey (black worms; Lumbriculus variegatus) were exposed for 48 h in the effluent of the fish exposure tanks before being fed to the fish (ration=2% body weight/day)....

Invasion biology research has identified two juxtaposing behavioural traits, aggressiveness and sociality, that may both increase the success of species invasions. Highly aggressive invaders can out-compete native species for resources, while social gregarious invaders can tolerate high conspecific density. In order to tease apart the effects of aggressive versus social tendencies on the succes...

Silver (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix) and bighead (H. nobilis) carp (collectively bigheaded carp) are invasive fish that threaten aquatic ecosystems in the upper Midwest United States and the Laurentian Great Lakes. Controlling bigheaded carp is a priority of fisheries managers and one area of focus involves developing acoustic deterrents to prevent upstream migration. For an acoustic deterrent ...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNA molecules that are processed from large 'hairpin' precursors and function as post-transcriptional regulators of target genes. Although many individual miRNAs have recently been extensively studied, there has been very little research on miRNA transcriptomes in teleost fishes. By using high throughput sequencing technology, we have identified 167 and 1...